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World War II History With a Social Security Link

My wife and I were recently doing a little house cleaning and downsizing. Specifically, we were going through many of our old books. We've finally decided that having shelves and shelves of hardbacks and paperbacks and other volumes wasn't impressing anyone anymore -- including ourselves. So, one by one, we are going through them and deciding which to keep and which should go in the library donation box.

As part of that process, I came across a book I decided to re-read. I first read it in 2012 and wrote a column about it back then. And unless some reader has been clipping all my columns for the past decade or more, I doubt if anyone remembers what I wrote back then. So, I'm going to write about it again.

The book is called "Citizens of London" by Lynne Olson. It tells the story of three influential Americans who were living in London in 1940 and who stood by Britain during its darkest hours -- that period when Great Britain alone was essentially defending freedom against the ravages of Hitler's war machine. (For those of my readers who are not history buffs, America before Pearl Harbor was dominated by isolationists who did not want our country to get involved in what they considered "that European war.")

But three forward-thinking men were working behind the scenes, serving as emissaries between Winston Churchill and former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, trying to funnel as much military and humanitarian aid as possible from the United States to England.

I'm sure most of my readers have heard of two of those men. One was Averell Harriman, the hard-driving millionaire who owned railroads, established the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho, dated celebrities, and became our Ambassador to Russia in 1943. But in early 1941, he was running FDR's "Lend Lease" program in London.

FDR, who knew the United States would have to enter the war eventually, used the "Lend Lease" program to provide military aid to our allies (primarily Great Britain) without immediate payment. This enabled England to acquire vital supplies like weapons, food and equipment, while the United States maintained a stance of official neutrality in the early years of the war. In return, America received long-term leases on military bases and promises of future payments or other benefits.

The other well known emissary was Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who became famous for his realistic and touching radio broadcasts from bomb-ravaged London.

However, I'll bet many of my readers never heard of the third influential American. And in fact, I bought the book in the first place all those years ago, because I had a small connection with him. His name was John Gilbert Winant.

Winant was a very interesting person. In the 1920s, he had won national acclaim as the youngest and most progressive governor in the country. (He was the Republican governor of New Hampshire.) But in the 1930s, as pointed out in "Citizens of London," "this rising Republican star with presidential dreams forfeited his political future by attacking the GOP for its slashing assaults on the New Deal, including Social Security."

In 1941, FDR appointed Winant to replace the isolationist -- and thus not very popular -- Joseph P. Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy) as our ambassador to Great Britain. It is in that role that John Winant was arguably the most influential and helpful American in Britain's hour of need. He worked closely with King George VI and Winston Churchill and won the hearts of the war-weary British public.

But the name John Gilbert Winant attracted me to read this book for another reason. For you see, before his stint as ambassador, he served as the first head of Social Security -- the agency that I worked for from 1973 until 2005.

In 1935, former President Roosevelt appointed Winant to lead the three-man board that would administer the new federal agency charged with running the Social Security program. FDR did so in part because he wanted the well known Republican to help thwart the fierce GOP opposition to the new law. Still, Senate Republicans filibustered and held up funding for the fledgling agency. But Winant and the other two board members, with minimal resources, worked tirelessly to hire staff and patch together a network of regional and field offices that would begin the daunting task of registering most workers in this country, assigning them a Social Security number, and setting up a system to record their earnings and eventually pay them monthly benefits.

Anyway, if you'd like to learn more about the early days of World War II (before Pearl Harbor), I can strongly recommend reading "Citizens of London."

With the space I have left in today's column, let's go down a tangential path to the topic we've been discussing. I am going to give you a series of names. I would give any reader a hundred bucks if he or she could tell me who they are and what they all have in common. Here are the names: Stanford Ross, William Driver, John Svahn, Martha McSteen, Dorcas Hardy, Gwendolyn King, Shirley Chate, Kenneth Apfel, Andrew Saul and Martin O'Malley.

So, who are they? They are 10 of the past 36 commissioners (including acting commissioners) of Social Security. The Commissioner of Social Security is the top spot within the Social Security Administration. He or she is responsible for running one of the largest agencies in the federal government, in charge of maintaining Social Security numbers and earnings records for nearly every working American and for paying retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to about 80 million people every month.

Yet, almost no one knows who these people are. Most folks can probably name the FBI director or the head of the CIA. But SSA is one of the many federal agencies whose top dog might as well be named "Underdog." Who heads the VA? Who is the Commissioner of the IRS? Who runs the Federal Highway Administration? How about the Bureau of Labor Statistics? The heads of these and so many other federal agencies are almost always nameless political appointees.

For part of my career with the SSA, I worked for several Social Security commissioners. Usually, in the role of a speechwriter. Sometimes, as a deputy press officer. By no means was I a major player on any commissioner's staff. If the commissioner had a meeting with his or her top deputies, I would be sitting in a chair in the corner of the room -- usually taking notes. But as I used to say: "At least I was in the room." And I sure would have loved to be in the room with John Winant when he was building the organization that would become the Social Security Administration!

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has two books with all the answers. One is called "Social Security -- Simple and Smart: 10 Easy-to-Understand Fact Sheets That Will Answer All Your Questions About Social Security." The other is "Social Security: 100 Myths and 100 Facts." You can find the books at Amazon.com or other book outlets. Or you can send him an email at thomas.margenau@comcast.net. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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